IT Windfall!

Some years ago, IT was moving at a snail´s pace in the Indian textile industry, but now even SMEs are going all-out for ERPs and PLMs, thanks to the realisation that these packages help in the long run, reports Indian Textile Journal.

IT revolution that fuelled winds of change in many industries a few years ago, only managed to skim the surface of the Indian textile industry without making much of a mark. But the scenario is interestingly different now. While the big names in the industry are chasing SAP & Oracle, the medium players and small-timers are embracing, quite visibly too, niche products that fit their tiny pockets. The IT trickle is showing all the signs of turning into a tide.

´Indian textile industry is expected to register the increasing adoption of the most advanced IT products. While the bigger players are expected to continue sticking to products and services offered by the IT giants, the smaller and mid-sized players will remain cautious about the return on investment while selecting the necessary products and services and thus pave the way for niche providers of IT products and services,´ say Kanti Prakash Brahma, Principal Consultant, Fashion and Amit Gugnani, Senior Vice President, Fashion-Textile & Apparel, both from Technopak.

Experts say the demand for IT from the textile vertical will be driven by the organised apparel segment which is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 13 percent over 10 years. The apparel accounted for 69 per cent of the total market size, and textiles contributed 31 per cent in 2012. The largest opportunity in the textile vertical lies in ERP integration. While many of the small scale companies use home grown or legacy ERP solutions with non-integrated modules, they are now realising benefits of an integrated ERP.

Speaking about the importance of IT in textile, Avinash Mayekar, MD & CEO of Suvin Advisors Pvt Ltd, said, ´Today all the information is available on click of the button. We can view the sales order, we can check the raw materials, we can track the inter department material movement, we can view the production plant, we can also view the status of the order and most importantly, all this information is real time; so it becomes much easier to plan, organise, manage and forecast.´

´IT has various applications into textile industry like order management, planning and control, quality management, recipe and technical management, production management, material management, business intelligence and human resource.

Textile machineries are manufactured with highly automated technology where only programme has to be fed and machinery is ready to take all the materials and chemicals automatically, so previously where 10-12 workers were required to operate a single machine, the number has reduced to 2-3 workers,´ says Mayekar. According to experts in the industry, many textile customers are opting for integrated ERP solutions under pressure from their customers who demand bar coding of products, end-to-end tracking of batches, and automated billing. Besides, with the short timelines, one can easily see the need for an integrated ERP solution.

BharatLoomtex Pvt Ltd, Inwveave Furnishing, Super Woollens Pvt Ltd, Jai Maa Textile, Prachi Handlloom, Ashna Textile and Livery Home; these are not very well-known companies, but are from SMEs. Their common bond is the use of Mac-ERP from the Macshell Infotech Pvt Ltd, a Delhi-based company, which also has a Global Development Centre in Panipat, Haryana. One of this Panipat-based client says that ´I have been using Mac-ERP software since nine years and I have been very much satisfied with the performance of this software and services of this company.´

Mac-ERP has been developed to fulfill the demand for unique business software solutions for the all kinds of furniture and textile manufacturing industries. To keep pace<